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Flex developers, stay put – our time is coming in 2008

I killed my morning listening to Adobe financial report published on December 14, 2006. What else can you do at 7AM on Saturday?

It proved what I wrote in my post a month ago. Adobe has great financial results, but Flex generated revenues were not there yet, which is fine for such a young tool as Flex 2. There is just one mentioning of the word Flex at the end of slide 17. Creative Suites products are fine. Acrobat is THE working horse. LiveCycle is the main bread winner in the enterprise sector. Flash Lite is doing great in mobile devices (phones and gaming).

If you listen to Q/A session (fast forward first three minutes if you are in a rush), it clearly states that Apollo is not expected to generate revenues in 2007. This is also understanable – Apollo has not been released yet. Flex was mentioned here as a path toward Apollo.

Twenty seventh minute into Q/A has yet another mentioning of Flex as a tool helping create Flash content.

The 30th minute – Apollo is for the future development leveraging development for existing formats such as PDF and SWF.
I do acknowledge the fact that Flex is a great tool, but as of today, Flex developers (myself included) are early adopters. We’ve gotten the Flex message a year earlier than the rest of the enterprise world. Stay put, improve your Flex skills, we are getting there. You’ll be able to monetize your skills in 2008.Big time.
Yakov Fain

I think this was to be expected — as I see it Flex 2 is now part of the Flash platform and making it free and open to developers will drive revenue for commercial products by Adobe taking this to the next level.

Looking at this financial report I think its import to see that Flex 2 is actually creating a lot of revenue at the moment, though not particularly for Adobe. Consultancy rates for Flex 2 projects have shot up and I for one have enough work offers coming in to cover 300% of my time.

This drive for Flex application development, and Apollo coming up some time in the new year will mark the Flash platform tools becoming a real source of revenue for Adobe. The best move they ever made is going free with the SDK — the market is creating itself before their very eyes and the demand for things like FDS (though I think they might need to tweak their pricing structure to accommodate a mid-size market) will only get bigger.

Agreed with Peter – the work’s out there. Particularly, it seems, specifically for Flex Charting – this seems to really be capturing imaginations as far as I can make out. I’m totally sticking with Flex – something this good has to be worth staying with!